Anotherblog

No blogs

It is sad that Ted has stopped blogging for a month. It means that until Dave starts posting regularly, I have no daily blogs to read, which I rather enjoy doing. If, however, you happen to have a blog that I was unaware of (ie. you are not Ted, and you have a weblog), send me an email. I must get my blog fix, and stranger-blogs are unsatisfying, however salubrious.

Finished songs for Evan
So, Anna and I have been trying to record songs onto the computer for the last couple of days. It is a humbling experience, not least because we don’t have a multi-track recorder. We started trying to record original songs with original lyrics, but were a bit stuck because neither of us can play any instruments well enough to record, or can compose songs good enough to sing without becoming embarassed and irritable. We got through the embarassed and irritable stage, reduced the scope of our efforts, decided not to care that the results would be crap because, what the hell, put them onto a CD last night and sent it off this morning to Ev. I’ll pass more of the semi-amusing details on once Ev has received them.

History
When I was about five, I can remember having “When We Were Only Six”, by A.A. Milne, read to me. I remember looking so much forward to being six, as I would surely by then be able to open door knobs myself. Recently I read a quote from Dorothy Parker regarding “When We Were Only Six”. She was reviewing the book under the pseudonym “Constant Reader”.

The review was as follows:

“Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up.”

Out to Lunch

There is a very nice thai place quite nearby, excellent food, large servings, quick service. The only downside was the rather steep cost, which turned out to be a misreading anyway - they have a lunchtime special at $7.50. Excellent. No doubt we will go through the entire menu of this one.

Train/walk
And the walk/train to work thing takes pretty much the same amount of time as it did to North Sydney - 50 minutes. Cycling will save me a good ten minutes per trip, once it’s all going. Meanwhile, however, I chickened out from cycling this morning, using the excuse that I still don’t have a key for the showers. And I bought a weekly train ticket, so it’ll probably be at least another week before I really get stuck into the bicycling thing.

Spelling shall be rectified
Karaoke, huh?

Buffy
I just finished reading all the buffy scripts for season five (because I can, and because I like reading scripts). Some of the scripts read better than they play out - I rather liked the troll episode in script form, for example - but the season finale reads very well indeed and should be one of the best episodes. I particularly liked it when Xander turned out to be Keyser Soze.

Anna’s voice

Anna was horrified to find out, on playback, that her voice wasn’t quite as good as she thought it was, an experience that I had gone through just the previous day. We were recording some music, ’cause what the hell, why not. As Anna commented - I’ll never laugh at bad Karioki (sp) singers again. Instead, I’ll be asking myself “What am I doing in a Karioki bar?”, which is pretty much what I would have done before the revelation that my voice tends to be a little sharp at times, so I guess it hasn’t had all that much impact on my life.

Work: Day 2 - Getting there
Bang goes my plan of cycling to work every day: it was raining so hard this morning that my knees got wet from the splashes of the rain on the ground. I caught the train to Town Hall and walked the rest of the way - a nice walk, when you have a great big golfing umbrella that is not freudianly significant in any way whatsoever. Anyway, hiding underneath my expanded plastic membrane, the trip took about twenty minutes, meaning that it takes about the same time to get to work as it did when I was in North Sydney, the main difference being that there is more walking and less training. I was thinking of (in future) getting a bag to protect my gear and cycling in wet weather anyway - promise of a warm shower at the end - but was strongly discouraged from doing so by Greg, cyclist extraordinaire, who says that cycling on Sydney roads in wet weather is expressing an unconscious death wish, and that if you attempted such in ignorance, you would pretty quickly end up unconscious, dead, or wishing that you hadn’t.

Work: Day 2 - Being there
Settling in was pretty quick. It’s a much larger office, there’s bunches more space (though, disturbingly, less personal storage space). The office partitions are lower, so that if I sit up straight at my desk, I can see many tops of heads up to a distance of about 30 metres away. Carlos, my evil ex-next-desk-worker, has a particularly fine view of the Anzac bridge, thanks to his many threats and, one one occasion, applications of half-starved ferrets. We went out to lunch together at a small cafe that served pizzinas (kinda like pizzas) and lemon juice, which I was compelled to try. It was lemon juice. They gave me honey to go with it, which, because it was cold, sank to the bottom to be dredged up by my straw. Yummy, but kinda tart. There seem to be a fair few cafes to try around here, anyway.

Work: Day 2 - the pool table
We have the pool table, but unfortunately they gave us a 6′ x 4′ table, which for any decent player is pretty pathetic. So it is still wrapped up while our secretary negotiates a pool-table-exchange. The table tennis table is still packed up, awaiting us to find a place to put it. We could (in principle) have it in one of the empty office areas, but I think the nearby teams wouldn’t be too happy with the resultant noise. So we might have to just make space in the lunch room, which would probably work if the pool table was squished over a little bit. And the Carrom (Indian game, rather good) board is out, much to the joy of us Carrom players.

Other than that, work is, y’know, pretty much the same.

Farewell to Papa once again

Dad took off on Sunday afternoon. We didn’t see as much of him this trip - he had relatives to see and late nights working - but still managed to see a film (Memento, for the second time for me, and even more impressive the second time around), go out to lunch at Planet Hollywood and get annoyed but the american waiters (yeah, yeah), played a bunch of games of Lost Cities, and listened to quite a lot of Paul Simon. Before he left, Dad bought a copy of Lost Cities to play with Mum. I hope she enjoys it.

Lost Cities and Amoeba
Dad is a very competitive player, though he tries not to be, which can be a bit of a turn-off for others ’cause he wins quite a lot. Even so, after being beaten like a kindegarten drum, I came back and hammered him in a couple of the later games - I managed a 104 score in one of my games, which I think might be a record for me. It really is a very good game. I’ve been thinking of redesigning Amoeba (the card game I’ve been working on, on and off, for the last ten years) to have a bit more luck involved - in games like Lost Cities, the luck in an important part of the replay value. At the moment, I’m trying to make the luck in Amoeba more centered around the interaction of players choices - so a sufficiently cunning player would be able to get around the luck element altogether.

New Games
Atlantis Games in Sydney is closing down. Apparently, this is more due to the hassles of dealing with distributers than lack of profitibility - the owner got sick of it all and decided to turn it in. I had no idea that distributers were so unpleasant. In any case, there was a massive sale so I picked up some cheaper cheapass games, and an expensive but intricate one called Gipf. I now have Unexploded Cow, Devil Bunny Hates the World, lots of Brawl decks, and James Earnest Writes Off A Trip to Vegas, none of which I have played yet. I need a board gaming group. Hey! I do have a board gaming group! Actually, what I need is a bit of organisation.

Editing
Without actually sullying my hands with actual editing, I managed to do some associated important work, transferring footage from one DV tape to another. The problem with the former tape was that it didn’t have consistant time-stamps throughout the tape - it reset the time-stamp twice within the tape. This was because I didn’t prep the tape before using it, and when I reviewed footage on the day, didn’t restart from the same place I left off, so that there was a gap with no recording. Anyhow, this is pretty annoying because when it happens, you can’t automatically capture to the tape from the computer, because the computer gets confused about where it is on the tape. So I fixed that up, and incidentally, watched some of my footage of Bullet Hole and was plunged into deep depression about my lousy acting. Perhaps I will find some takes that don’t involve me mugging outrageously.

Anna’s work
Anna managed a huge amount of work on the weekend, paying for the rent with the work on Saturday alone. Yay! Last week started pretty slowly, but the last bit has turned it from a slow week to one of the best ones. And the exciting bit is that there was quite a bit more work from the Hilton Hotel this time around. The bummer was that she was late home both on Saturday and Sunday - but once there is more work there will be more therapists, so it’s only a temporary thing…

New Office
I cycled to the new office this morning. Set off at 8:10 or thereabouts, found several hills that I just didn’t realise were there because I was driving before, and arrived at about 8:45. Pretty good! If you count that I had to stop and check directions a couple of times, and took some sub-optimal directions and probably did at least one more hill than I had to, not to mention that I was staggeringly unfit, then I could probably manage the trip in about twenty minutes or so. This is going to be great! I’m going to be fit! Meanwhile, I will be falling asleep at the computer, but that’s a small price to pay, unless I get fired, in which case it’s too large a price to pay and what the hell was I thinking? Stupid fitness program.

No really, now I’ll be talking about the new office. Writing. Writing about the new office.
I emptied the garbage from my boxes into the drawers of my new desk with somewhat too much glee (enjoying the fact that I was simply reversing my packing procedure), connected my computer up, and had finished moving before 9:00am. The network people have done an admirable job of connecting everything up so we had email immediately, and web access by lunchtime. But I couldn’t do the work I was supposed to, because the licencing server wasn’t going, so I ended up doing some lovely coding in C++ instead, which, lets face it, is the part of being a computer programmer that is easily the most fun, unless you count coding in Java, which is even more fun. But I’d already done the Java coding. Now I am sad.

Not really! Actually, I’ve hit that tired bit that I was predicting when, this morning, I was going up that hill that I shall name “The Bitch”. Sleeepy. Soooo sleeeeepy.

Not so bad now

We’re gearing down for the move (my company is moving to Pyrmont from North Sydney) now, having longer lunches and getting in our table tennis while we can - 21-15, 21-18, 21-11 against Carlos - so things aren’t quite so frantic as they were yesterday. I have to organise moving the desk and the filing cabinet this weekend and then hopefully we can tidy up the spare room. I hope it doesn’t rain, I’m booking a ute.

Dad
Dad’s in town again, so Anna and I introduced him to “Lost Cities”. He’s very good at this kind of think, and handily thrashed us both after a single practice game. He still hasn’t lost his touch. And he’s going for runs every morning at 6:00am, preparing for a trek in the Himalayas in November. Three weeks of walking. Damn, I don’t think I’ve *ever* been fitter than him, and I’m not sure if he’s ever been fitter than he is now. Time to start cycling to work, as of Monday - it’s only 8km which is half the distance I cycled to university back when *I* was marginally fit.

Ah. Work. Stress. Tired.

With a title like that, you can’t be expecting much of a subject. Rightly so, too, I’m too stuffed. Dad’s arriving tonight for the second half of his visit. Hopefully that will cheer me up.

Ooooh.

CD copying fast-track

Life has become so much easier now that I have two CDROMs in my PC. Well, I have had two for a while, but I finally sorted out the software problems that were preventing one from being recognised, and now I can do a copy of a CD with a single click, which should streamline the Spit production somewhat.

Nicht so gut
Not going quite as well are my efforts to quicktimify Once Upon A Time. Unfortunately, although Adobe Premiere is perfectly capable of joining multiple clips together to create a quicktime movie from them, the inner formats that it allows (quicktime is a wrapper on other formats, eg. mpeg-2) are not recognised by anything outside of Adobe Premiere. Bugger. And as far as I can tell, none of the other streaming dooby-whackers allow multiple clips to be entered, which is a bit awkward. Problem is, a 33 minute film is approximately 9GB in DV format, and win98 maximum file size is 2GB. The end compressed file will be a lot smaller, obviously, but in order to get it there, I’ve got to have the original as one clip for something like windows stream-on-demand to convert it.

Big work move
The big work move is a coming up. Apparently on Friday, the network shuts at 10:00am so there’ll probably be an afternoon of table-tennis, glorious table-tennis!

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Nefarious dealings over the ping-pong table this morning - the social \clug is sending it to Artarmon, where there is a smaller Baltimore facility. Hopefully we’ll be able to buy a new table at Pyrmont, otherwise we’ll… sob… we’ll just have to make do with only a pool table. The heartbreak!

Where hearts were entertained in June
I got a copy of the first draft for the Brazil screenplay. It’s very different to the final product, and the differences are particularly interesting because Tom Stoppard made the changes after the first draft, and was nominated for an academy award. The essence of the story is the same throughout, but the details… well, Jill is a social worker in this draft, Sam gets into trouble in the first place by helping out Jack Lint, Mr Helpmann is an ineffectual, pathetic figure, and Sam is a much younger, active person.

Ah. I see.

In fact, all those problems with the Newsroom were because I had run out of space on otherleg.com. Amanda removed some great big temporary files (thanks, Amanda!) and now we’re good to go again. Phew!

Getting Crosser

…and now it appears that the Newsroom has vanished from otherleg. I hope this blog clears it up, ’cause otherwise I’m going to become irate.